Finger method of judging graphic design

Katie Cunningham mentioned this in her blog post today. Since I was asked what that was meant by several people I decided to write it up so you can see one of my rants.

The method is simple:

• Put your design on a screen.
• Your hand goes on the screen with fingers horizontal. Ignore the thumb.
  
• Count how many fingers it takes from the top of the screen to content. If you run out of fingers on one hand that means your wonderful design is going to force users to scroll to content. Maybe not on your huge desktop monitor, but on the sort of desktop monitor or laptop that has become ubiquitous, absolutely!
• I have tiny hands for a guy. So for you people with big hands, try it with two or three fingers.
  

Now lets take a look at how the Python community matches up to my finger method.

• http://python.org is just one of my fingers! Python.org FTW!
• http://djangoproject.org is two of my fingers! Good job Django!
• http://plone.org has a new and improved site that is two to three of my fingers, depending on the location. Plone does good!
• http://www.turbogears.org jumps between three and four fingers. Acceptable.
• http://code.google.com is two and a half fingers to content on project pages. Definately workable!
• https://github.com gets it with three fingers.
• http://pinaxproject.com is over four fingers to get to content? Boo!
  
• http://code.pinaxproject.com makes up for the parent site with two fingers to get to content.

So the Python community does pretty well on average. So does Facebook, Twitter, and the other good social networking sites. Now think about the sites that never went anywhere and how my finger method applies.

How about some some abject failures from outside the python community?

• CSS Zen Garden is lovely. And yet the designs are often unworkable to anyone outside of a group of graphic designers looking to hand each other design awards. You get designs that take ten (10) fingers before you get to content. WTF?
• http://www.apple.com/mac fails at over four fingers.
  
• http://www.microsoft.com/windows/help-how-to.aspx goes over four fingers and includes my thumb.
• http://www.adobe.com is as bad as the stuff on CSS Zen Garden.
  

Is this scientific? Heck no. Yet it is a quick and cheap gauge as to why you rarely get repeat visits to your site or why they only visit your download pages.